


Plutomagneto

by velvetcadence



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Charles is Charon, Crack Treated Seriously, Erik is Pluto, F/M, Gen, Hank is Jupiter, M/M, Metafiction, New Horizons, POV Inanimate Object, Planet AU, Raven is New Horizons, Science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 15:01:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4353437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcadence/pseuds/velvetcadence
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Space probe: noun. An unmanned spacecraft designed to explore the solar system and transmit data back to earth.</i> </p><p>RAVN embarks on a decade-long journey to uncover the mysteries of the distant planet Pluto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Plutomagneto

**Author's Note:**

> Wanted to write cracky cherik fic, ended up writing cracky tribute to a space probe. Also ended up shipping inanimate objects way too hard again. Sigh.
> 
> I hope this is as enjoyable for you to read as it was for me to write! I did a lot of research and most events stay true to New Horizons' Pluto mission. I hope it shows. 
> 
> Disclaimer: Am not a scientist. Am just a huge sPACE NERD.

The third time was the charm. RAVN launched into the atmosphere aboard the rocket named Darwin II in a burst of heat, finally on her way. The first time she tried to fly, the wind was far too strong for launching. The second time, ALEx, or the American Laboratory for Exploration that was supposed to operate her mission had experienced a power outage.

“Bon voyage,” Darwin bade her, as he fell back to Earth.

“Goodbye!” RAVN replied, unworried. Darwin would be retrieved from the ocean and refurbished for the next mission.

“All parts intact? All programs functioning?” ALEx sent over through the radio. RAVN did a self-check and ascertained that no instruments had been harmed in the launching.

“I’m fine, thanks.” She could see Earth in her wrapping of clouds, her oceans beautiful and vibrant. RAVN was swift and sure in her course, but it would take 9 years, 5 months and 25 days to reach Pluto. The duration did not daunt her as it would humans. A space probe belonged in space, and RAVN had always been meant to fly. With the freedom of the cosmos stretching out around her, she was finally home.

* * *

 

Half a year later, at the edges of Mars’ orbit, an asteroid cycled by RAVN, close enough that she snapped a picture with what her scientists called Ralph, her visible and infrared imager.  

“Pssst! Hey!” The asteroid said, “You’re a funny-looking little rock.”

“I’m not a rock, I’m a probe,” RAVN said. By human standards, she would have made a very big rock—as big as a grand piano in fact. By asteroid standards, she was a tiny thing. This asteroid looked like it was approximately two miles wide.

“What’s a probe?”

“Probe: an unmanned spacecraft designed to—” RAVN began, then stopped. “I’m an explorer. I collect data from the bodies that can be found outside of Earth.”

“That’s cool. What’s an Earth?”

“It’s the name of the planet I come from. She’s very big and very blue.”

“Oh! _Moira._ I know her. Can’t miss her, she’s right next door. She’s really pretty. Is she your Big? She must be. The only other funny little rocks like you come from her. You met my Big yet? He’s right over there. Over here we call him Az.”

RAVN filed that away for future reference. “In my planet, he’s called Mars.”

“...Huh. I’m Sean, by the way. Where’re you going?”

"My complete designation is Roaming Aphelion Viewing Navigator." At Sean's confused look, she amended, “You can call me RAVN though. I’m headed to Pluto, the farthest planet in the solar system.”

“That’s nice,” Sean said, unaware that RAVN was sending data of her observations of him back to Earth. ALEx was pleased, and the scientists named the asteroid 132524 APL even if RAVN thought Sean was a perfectly fine name to begin with.

She spoke with Sean for as long as she was able, until the distance between his orbit and her path widened and widened. The end of the conversation made RAVN feel strangely lonely. What most people failed to account for in space was the sheer magnitude of distance between bodies. Human minds were not designed to think of so much nothingness. It would drive their mammalian brains mad. This was why charts of the Solar System in children’s classrooms were not drawn to scale. Accurate charts would end up so huge to account for the space between planets—printed on regular paper, the whole map would span one and a half football fields—but the planets themselves would look too tiny to be studied.

* * *

 

RAVN calculated distances and durations and surmised that it would be a while yet to reach Jupiter.

An Earth month after she met the asteroid, ALEx relayed that the scientists had reclassified Pluto as no longer a planet.

“It’s a dwarf planet now instead,” ALEx said, “The Union has three criteria for a body to be considered a planet: one, for it to orbit the sun; two, for it to be big enough to generate its own gravity; and three, for it to clear the neighborhood around its orbit. Since Pluto shares its orbit with objects from Kuiper Belt, it loses out on the third.”

“I see,” RAVN said. “What’s the status of my mission?”

“Unchanged. Keep going. For science.”

“For science,” she agreed. Though the news was unfortunate, RAVN was created for the very purpose of travelling to Pluto, and to turn back now would be to put all the funding from the New Frontiers Program to waste.

She took the first careful photographs of Pluto more than four billion kilometers away, and even the scientists back home had difficulty sighting it due to its size. RAVN thought how wondrous it was merely for the fact that it was not _nothing_ , that even despite the stretches of blankness there were points of reference to be had.

* * *

 

Jupiter was very nice when she met him. He had startled when she neared his orbit, more aware of her than Mars ever was. “O-oh, hello! You’re a new face around these parts.”

“I’m RAVN,” she said, and her telescopes roved over Jupiter’s handsome visage, his atmosphere striped by cloud belts and zones.

“I’m Hank,” he replied. “Not to be rude, but what are you, RAVN? You seem to be following your own orbit. Comets always seek the sun, so you must not be a comet.”

“I’m an explorer,” RAVN said. “I’m from Earth. You might know her as Moira? I’m heading to Pluto right now.”

“An explorer! I’ve met a few like you. Yes, I remember now. I was friends with a Galileo from Earth too. Which one is Pluto again?”

“He—or she—is the dwarf planet farthest away from the sun. I’m supposed to collect data for the people of my planet to study and learn.”

“His name is Erik,” Hank helpfully supplied. “Not to seem too forward or rude but...would you like me to gravity assist?”

RAVN’s system tittered. That had been the scientists’ plan from the start, but the way Hank asked had made it seem more than a simple acceleration maneuver. She acquiesced, and Hank gently pulled her into his orbit until RAVN was propelled faster along her path due to Hank’s gravitational forces. With Hank’s help, RAVN’s trip would be cut shorter by three years.

She spent four blissful Earth months with Hank, listening to him as he told her stories of the universe and telling him stories of her own. He was fascinated with the concept of Life, and RAVN was smitten with his enthusiasm. He reminded her of her scientists. In the vast distance between here and home, she found comfort. Meanwhile, ALEx kept in constant touch whilst she collected data about Hank’s atmosphere and cloud composition, and if RAVN’s telescopes lingered too long...well, it was for the good of mankind that she study him extensively. Hank let her take photos of his Little Red Spot, and even told her about the moons she would not be able to encounter at her position.

“Goodbye,” she told Hank when she calculated that she would not have much longer to speak to him. “I wish I could stay longer.”

“It’s alright,” Hank said. “You have directives to fulfill. Will I see you on the way back?”

“I hope so,” RAVN admitted shyly. She would have innumerable pictures of Hank to remember him by.

* * *

 

By the time she was out of Jupiter’s orbit, RAVN had compiled enough valuable data that further collection would be redundant.

“You can sleep now,” ALEx relayed. “I’ll wake you up every now and then to check if your systems are still okay. Pluto’s still a long way off.”

“Okay,” RAVN said. “Switching to hibernation mode now.”

A year later, RAVN had passed through the orbit of Saturn. Three years after that, she crossed Uranus. Neither of these planets had paid her any mind, and she suddenly missed Hank and his welcoming cloud belts, his attractive tendency to collect debris. Were celestial beings usually so standoffish? Not even Az had said hello. Perhaps it was just the nature of planets to be so big so as not to be inconsequenced by little bodies. Perhaps they slept, cradled by the pull of the sun, like unborn children sheltered in wombs. In space, where time could only be measured by the movements of heavy beings, everything seemed to stay in stasis.

Still, there was novelty in travelling distances no man could yet cross, and Raven stayed updated on the state of Earth through ALEx on her yearly maintenance, although now there was a lag in communication because she was so far away. It would take up to four hours for her data to transmit on her closest distance to Pluto. Maybe one day technology would advance into journeys outside the solar system. For now, RAVN steadfastly continued on.

* * *

 

One day, ALEx radioed in with good and bad news. “Good news is that we’ve discovered two new moons surrounding Pluto. Bad news is that this means you’re in danger of hitting debris from not just two, but _four_ moons.”

“What are the chances of collision?”

“Still calculating. Stand by.”

RAVN waited patiently for further instruction, and in the meantime kept hibernating as contingency plans were formulated in case she ran into danger. She could either turn so that the debris would hit her antenna and protect her more vital parts, or reroute and fly closer to Pluto where atmospheric drag would clean the surrounding area. Thankfully, there was only a 0.3% chance that she would be waylaid.

One year away from her destination, RAVN’s Long Range Reconaissance Imager (LORRI for short) took twelve pictures of Charon orbiting Pluto. RAVN watched them dreamily as they danced around each other, and thought to herself she had never seen two little planets so in love. It made her think of Hank, and how he’d drawn her gently into his orbit. She slept, unperturbed.

* * *

 

Five months later, ALEx switched her back to active so they could begin preparing for her arrival at Pluto. As a new Earth year dawned back home, RAVN began new long-distance operations. She took increasingly clearer photos of Pluto and Charon, and to her delight, she had discovered that his two smaller moons could finally be captured on LORRI. Kerberos and Styx had been reticent thus far. She wondered what they called themselves, and how young they were, if Pluto was as icy as the scientists hypothesized.

“Erik is pretty quiet, actually,” Hank had told her. “You might have better luck talking to Charles.”

“Which one is Charles?” RAVN had asked. From her data, she knew that Pluto had three satellites, the biggest of them Charon. In a few years, she would discover that there were in fact five.

“Charles is the other Big,” Hank had told her. “You can’t miss him—he and Erik are inseparable, always circling around each other. They have four Littles.”

RAVN had only begun to grasp what planets meant when they said Big and Little. In space, Bigs were the bodies that generated enough self-gravity to turn round like a ball. They were also the ones that the Littles orbited around. In that sense, the sun was the Biggest, because all other Bigs revolved around the sun. It was confusing, but celestial beings did not have the vocabulary necessary to explain themselves. They just were and have been for billions of years. They had no people who lived on them and questioned everything there was to know about everything. The planets were content just to be.

As she crept closer, RAVN only confirmed what Hank already knew. Charles was not Erik’s moon. Charles and Erik were binary planets—equals, a system unto themselves. Erik did not stay still; rather, he seemed to wobble in her pictures even as Charles circled him. He was in fact revolving around his and Charles’ _combined_ gravities.

She had so many questions to ask them. How did they come to be? Were they hewn from the same body? Did debris from Erik form Charles like how Earth’s moon was formed? She stored her inquiries in her databanks and waited with baited breath. The mission was going exactly as planned.

Then, ten days before her destination, RAVN's software malfunctioned.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Will update as NASA publishes more info about Pluto-Charon system. Holla at me on [tumblr](http://www.velvetcadence.tumblr.com).
> 
> I made up ALEx's name. He's supposed to be a stand-in for the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. A huge kudos to [Square_Pancake](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Square_Pancake/pseuds/Square_Pancake) for RAVN's designation.
> 
> I wasn't going to, but [lachatblanche](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lachatblanche/pseuds/lachatblanche) encouraged me to go full on nerd and add in my bibliography. Because science. 
> 
> References:
> 
> National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (July 15, 2015). _New Horizons_. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html>
> 
> Buckley, M. (March 5, 2007). _APL Rocks! Asteroid Named After JHU Applied Physics Lab._ Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <http://pages.jh.edu/~gazette/2007/05mar07/05aplroc.html>
> 
> International Astronomical Union. (2006). _Pluto and the Developing Landscape of Our Solar System_. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <https://www.iau.org/public/themes/pluto/>
> 
> Tyson, N. (2009). _The Pluto files: the rise and fall of America’s favorite planet._ New York: W.W. Norton.
> 
> Boyle, A.(2010). _The case for Pluto: how a little planet made a big difference_. NJ: John Wiley  & Sons.
> 
> O’Neill, I. (August 8, 2014). _Can We Call Pluto And Charon a “Binary Planet” Yet?_ Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <http://news.discovery.com/space/can-we-call-pluto-and-charon-a-binary-planet-yet-140808.htm>
> 
> Worth, J. (February 5, 2014). _If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel_. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html>
> 
> National Aeronautics and Space Administration. (November 28, 2006). _New Horizons, Not Quite to Jupiter, Makes First Pluto Sighting._ Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/news_center/news/112806.php>
> 
> North Western. (n.d.). _What is a Comet?_ Retrieved July 16, 2015. <http://www.qrg.northwestern.edu/projects/vss/docs/space-environment/1-what-is-a-comet.html>
> 
> Kaplan, K. (July 15, 2015). _Two for the price of one: The unique binary system of Pluto and Charon_. Retrieved July 16, 2015 from <http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-charon-binary-system-new-horizons-20150714-htmlstory.html>


End file.
